How Long Should Your Content Be For Optimal SEO?

Jayson DeMers
, ContributorI demystify SEO and online marketing for business owners.Opinions expressed by Forbes Contributors are their own.

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How Long Should Your Content Be for SEO?

Content is king when it comes to SEO. You can’t have an SEO campaign without content; it’s the fuel that makes SEO work.

You’ve heard this all before, but it’s less often that you hear about the specific, objective qualities that make content effective. Millions of businesses and individuals are competing for visibility in search engines, and many of them are writing what is, subjectively, “good” content. But what makes that content “good”?

You can point to the writing style, the target audience, the practicality, and various other subjective factors, but today I want to focus on one specific, objective factor; is the length of your content a predictor of its SEO performance? And if so, what’s the ideal length of content to earn a high ranking in organic search results?

Page Content Minimums

Obviously, different types of content should be considered differently; for example, the core pages of your website don’t need as much content as your blog articles, since they won’t be addressing specific questions and instead will serve as anchor points for your brand. Still, every page of your site needs to have a certain “minimum” amount of content, or else it will be perceived as “thin.”

There’s no clear formula, or single answer for the minimum amount of content a page should have. Some sources suggest having at least 600-700 words of content on every page, which will allow you to include multiple variations of your target keywords and provide a decent amount of information to your readers on almost any subject. However, it won’t take you long to find a top-ranked page that features as little as 300 words.

As you’ll soon see, while content length is correlated with higher rankings, there’s actually another variable that has a stronger influence on rankings. However, for now, understand that at least 300 words is a good minimum to shoot for.